Millennium of Turkish Literature : a concise History

Mihri Hatun
(d. 1506)
This woman poet lived a free life of lovemaking and levity. Her beauty was 
legendary, and she had aff airs with some of the celebrities of her time. For many 
years, she was a member of the intellectual circle around Prince Ahmed. When 
she was criticized for her aff airs, she struck back in verse:
At one glance
I loved you
With a thousand hearts
They can hold against me
No sin except my love for you
Come to me
Don’t go away
Let the zealots think
Loving is sinful
Never mind
Let me burn in the hellfi re
Of that sin
One of Mihri’s most accomplished poems is a 
gazel
 (lyric ode). Her mention of 
Alexander is a reference to her lover I˙skender.
I woke, opened my eyes, raised my head: There with his face bright
And exquisite like the full moon, he was standing upright.
Was it my lucky star, was I blessed with divine power?
In my fi eld of vision, Jupiter ascended tonight.
He looked like a Muslim, but was wearing pagan garments;
From his enchanting face—I saw clearly—came streaming light.
By the time I had opened and closed my eyes, he vanished:
He was—I divined—a heavenly angel or a sprite.
Mihri shall never die: She found the elixir of life,
She saw Alexander beaming in the dark of the night.

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50
A Millennium of Turkish Literature
Another remarkable woman poet was Leylâ Hanım (d. 1847). Her 
marriage lasted one week. Many of her own love poems were presumably 
addressed to women. By the standards of her day, she led a liberated life. 
Some of her daring verses scandalized the moralists of the period.
Drink all you want in the rose-garden. Who cares what they say!
Better enjoy life to the hilt. Who cares what they say!
Could it be that my cruel lover sees my tears as dewdrops?
Like a blooming rose, s/he is all smiles. Who cares what they say!
I am your lover and your loyal slave, my beautiful—
And shall remain so till Doomsday. Who cares what they say . . .
I see my rival is chasing you—Come lie beside me.
You say No? Well, then, so much for you. Who cares what they say.
Leylâ, indulge in pleasure with your lovely, moon-faced friend;
Make sure you pass all your days in joy. Who cares what they say!
Aft er serving its function of heralding change and once established in 
its genre and confi dent in its intellectual orientation, 
Divan
poetry remained 
recalcitrant to internal change. It was only aft er several centuries of scle-
rotic continuity that 
Divan
verse introduced various formal and substantive 
changes. A signifi cant innovation was undertaken by Nedim (d. 1730), the 
poet of the so-called Tulip Age, who lived la dolce vita and wrote of Sar-
danapalian pleasures. He dropped his predecessors’ abstractions and hack-
neyed clichés in favor of depictions of physical beauty (aesthetic, human, 
and topographical), made an attempt to “democratize” conventional verse 
by increasing its appeal through greater intelligibility, and dispensed with 
the masochistic and misogynistic implications of the 
Divan
poetry of the 
previous centuries, replacing them with the joys of love and living.
Şeyh Galib, the last of the great romantic mystics of the eighteenth cen-
tury, also made an important renovation by getting away from the clichés 
and the frozen conceits and by making original metaphors a new vehicle of 
artistic expression in his masterwork